The U.S. Department of Agriculture just published a new estimate of how much it costs to raise a child today.

According to the feds, your basic model no-frills kid will set you back $245,000.

That’s without college.

Nearly a quarter-million bucks to get a kid from the maternity ward to his 18th birthday. For that kind of bread, your kid better turn out to be Prince William.

And that $245,000 is just the national average. In high-rent areas like the urban Northeast and very pricey Los Angeles that same basic no-frills kid will set you back $455,000.

And what do we get for almost half a million? Attitude.

The USDA says the average middle-class American couple will fork over $107,970 to house and transport Doug Jr. And then, $44,400 will go for child care, $39,060 on food, $20,130 on health care and $33,780 on clothes and miscellaneous items like bouncy houses at birthday parties and a third iPhone after the first two iPhones are either dropped in the toilet or left on the school bus.

Granted, everything is more expensive today than it was when I was a kid, but half a million per child in Los Angeles? Who financed this study, the condom lobby?

The good news is there are deals to be had.

You can always move to Nebraska or one of those rectangular states where kids are a steal at only $145,000 a pop. Farm kids apparently expect less than hipster urban children.

In the age of $160 sneakers, $200 jeans, smartphones, expensive game systems and coaches and lessons for everything, we’ve finally produced a generation that makes boomers seem like a bargain.

Small wonder Bankrate.com reports more than a third of American adults have no retirement savings at all, zero, including 14 percent of the 65-plus crowd. Who’s got any money left after raising half-million-dollar kids?

Are we getting our money’s worth? I’m sure there were many times, even at 1960s prices, my father would have said no.

Yet, somehow, we do it. Somehow parents strive to do as much for their kids as we can, sometimes even to the point of absurdity.

We’ve all seen the over-involved parent who tries to insulate their offspring from every bump in the road, setting their kid up for a lifetime of dependency or despair when the cord is finally cut.

With abundant cheap labor, many of our half-million-dollar kids have never cut a lawn or skimmed their pool, and it’s not uncommon for Sweet Sixteen parties in Southern California to be even sweeter for the local BMW dealer. I wonder how much of that $455,000 the government says we spend on our kids is not only unnecessary but actually destructive.

Raising children in big cities is quickly becoming a luxury reserved for the rich.

In 2000, the L.A./Orange County area ranked sixth out of the top 52 metropolitan areas for children ages 5-14. Today we rank 33rd, a 12.8 percent drop, the largest fall-off in the country and a 20 percent drop overall. LAUSD enrollment is down to 655,494 from a 2003-2004 peak of 747,009.

It doesn’t take Nostradamus to figure out why L.A. has experienced such a significant decline in families with children.

The promise of a middle-class nirvana that drew so many to the San Fernando Valley and Southern California in general has degenerated into a crowded and expensive proposition where far too often the local schools are failing and the private schools are beyond the reach of even two paycheck parents.

This is not just a Los Angeles problem, but it’s particularly acute here. While we hand-wring over the plight of the homeless and housing for the poor, we’re silently standing by as the next generation of Angelenos is priced out of Los Angeles.

Doug McIntyre’s column appears Sunday and Wednesday. He can be reached at: Doug@KABC.com.

Doug McIntyre is host of "McIntyre in the Morning" on 790 KABC in Los Angeles, heard weekdays from 5-10 a.m. He also hosted "Red Eye Radio" both locally and nationally and has been talking into a microphone for 20 years. He writes a weekly column for the Southern California News Group.